Nominated

What a surprise to find out that I have been nominated for a Kreative Blogger award by Sherryl Buchler! I have been following her blog Having Fun since meeting her on the Fiberarts Group  started by Ms. Annie Copeland. Sherryl does the most amazing fabric using dye. Her latest class took her to a shibori workshop and I am drooling over her pieces!!

The rules of the award are:

1. The winner may put the logo on her blog.

2. Put a link to the person you got the award from in your blog.

3. Nominate 5 blogs.

4. Put links to the blogs.

5. Leave a message for your nominees.

So the nominees are: Christine Swieszcz  and her blog Lily & Paris Designs. She likes to do hand embroidery and pairs that with wonderful color combinations. I frequently ask for her help/opinion when stuck on a project. 

Katherine Sands blog, Art Journal - A Creative Journey.  She is doing all kinds of experimentation with dye, fabric and surface design. I had the pleasure of meeting her at IQA Chicago last April. Fun, fun, fun!

I found Ms. Fannie Narte through a message she left on my blog. Her blog, Fannie Narte

holds a vast array of wonderful eye candy. She is more of a mixed media gal with a web presence and an etsy shop. 

My next nominee is another person I met at the IQA show in Chicago last April. Lynn Krawczyk has a wicked sense of humor and her blog never fails to make me laugh out loud. Her blog Fibra Artysta-Mixed Media is another I frequent. 

And finally, so hard to pick only 5! Virginia Spiegel who blogs at Virginia A. Spiegel on a very regular basis. She is a driving force for the American Cancer Society. She has several fundraisers involving artists from around the world as well as posting inspirational thoughts, prose and pictures. She posts her works in progress as well as her completed pieces, always leaving me scratching my head wondering how she achieved such wonderful surfaces on fabric! 

Happy Thanksgiving!

Madelyn was in a very creative mood. We were at Michael's yesterday getting t-shirts for the Brownie's troop project for next week. For some reason, she is totally taken with styrofoam. If you have priced it lately, you will see that it is getting a little pricey. So I let her get a package of 12 1" balls and made her give me three for a project I am working on.
Once we got home, she immediately went to work on her "masterpiece". I love watching her work. She tears around the house collecting all the pieces she needs and then sits to work on the project. Here is the fruits of her labors.

Initially, I thought I was looking down into a pen of turkeys and they were looking back at me. Madelyn explained that they were turkey's and the styrofoam pieces were their eyeballs. They were hiding in water, in a fenced in area and the big square created the walls of the room. The outline around the eyeballs is their bodies. 

I asked if they were hiding so they wouldn't be available for someone's table. She looked at me like I was strange. I don't think she is equating live turkey's with the one on the table just yet. 

Finished!

I took this Elements class at Quilt University with Linda Schmidt over a year ago. I made four art pieces and never managed to finish any of them - until now!
I have been slowly working on this in between kid activities. Finally finished it yesterday. This was obviously the element of fire. Her binding techniques called for either a sheer border or to do a pieced border. Neither seemed to work for me so I left it as. One of the reasons I didn't finish this on time is because I didn't do a small version of this. The class samples were supposed to be done in a 9" x 12" format or thereabouts. I like working a little bigger so that is part of the reason this took so long. I plan on using this in my bedroom. One down and three more to go.

Garden Art Quilt

This is my contribution to a project done for a very special lady - Ms. Anne Copeland. She founded a non-profit organization to help promote textile arts and people with disabilities doing art. She is tireless in her effort and for that, we are all especially grateful. You can visit her group at http://www.fiberartsconnsocal.org/gallery.html A group of people made little mini art quilts for her. We put them into a scrapbook album so that she could look through them whenever she needed inspiration. I was in charge of the cover.

I dyed the fabric using setacolor dyes. When dry, I heat set and then stamped a fern image through the background in three different colors. I then outlined each of them to help pull out the details a little more. Annie loves flowers so I decided to make her a little garden she can enjoy year round. I embroidered various flowers around the front cover and also added sequins and beads for tiny flowers. I just loved how it turned out.

Sunset

Here is the second piece I managed to finish for the Stay at Home Challenge for AAQI.

Hand dyed fabrics, hand and machine quilted. As usual, picture doesn't do it justice. The colors are much more vibrant. Played with it in photoshop but this is as good as it is going to get apparently. Oh well.